


Blue-eyed Boy

by ary_x



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, Steve Rogers (mentioned) - Freeform, Winter Soldier story arc, and then bucky centric, red skull (mentioned) - Freeform, somewhat canon compliant, zola centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-21
Updated: 2015-12-21
Packaged: 2018-05-08 04:57:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,966
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5484362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ary_x/pseuds/ary_x
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky was always Zola's favourite. Can't say the feeling's mutual. What we can say, though, is that everything Bucky did, everything Bucky forgot, was because he wanted to live.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blue-eyed Boy

**Author's Note:**

> Hi! If you're reading this, thank you! I hope you'll like that story. I can't promise it'll follow canon 100%, but I keep watching interviews of Sebastian Stan and the way he talks about Bucky/Winter... Well I had this idea, and I didnt want to keep it just for me. This is my take on the Winter Soldier's genesis.
> 
>  
> 
> Please note that even though it is brief, I think Zola and his team have an ableist behaviour/vocabulary at some point.
> 
> Please talk to me in the comments or on [Tumblr](http://addiction-ary.tumblr.com/)!

Zola’s attempt at recreating Erskine’s serum had killed a dozen men. But not James Barnes. That one does have something special in him.

Captain America had become a problem. He and his gang were destroying facility after facility. It made HYDRA look like a bunch of powerless fools. The Red Skull was mad, and wanted this dealt with. Zola on the other hand had been in for the science since the beginning. Power was only a means to him, not an end, and that’s where he differed from Schmidt. He was just genuinely sad at all the amount of data that had been lost. However, there was still one thing on which he would undoubtedly agree with Schmidt: Captain America was a problem, a problem who had stolen his most successful experiment from him at that. Though, truth be told, Zola hoped to the Gods that Schmidt remained totally oblivious to how successful exactly his experiment had been. Good thing Arnim Zola had spent his entire life solving problems.

Of course they’d take the bait. This was just the kind of challenge they liked. Zola would be there, on that train, to watch Captain America die. He had teams on the ground, ready to look for his body if the guy thought he could survive such a jump. There are still so many things you can learn from a corpse... He could use it to keep working on the serum, replicate Erskine’s formula. With Captain America’s corpse, he could do it in record time. He’d started thinking about it already, and given how close his last attempt had seemed… The fact that Barnes had survived the injections and stimulation was already proof of what huge progress he had made. Thanks to this plan, he would be able to test Barnes again and compare, see if his serum had actually enhanced him, and how much.

He would get Barnes back. The best of all his works. A man with his skills, a man with his determination and loyalty… He could be the rock on which Zola would rebuild HYDRA. He would be. And Zola would make sure he became even more perfect than he already was.

***

The Red Skull can’t know. This is a secret he has to keep from him. The goal is to kill Captain America, and whoever else might be there. Destroy that gang of his. That Zola wants one of them for him, alive, is not something the Red Skull can understand. Schmidt believes in extermination, while Zola devotes himself to evolution.

If Schmidt knew what Zola was after, he’d try to crush it. He’d want Barnes dead even more than he wanted to see Captain America failing. Zola knows, deep down, has always known, that he had been allowed to work on the serum only because Schmidt thought he had no chance of coming close to succeeding. If he knew that there was even the tiniest of chances… He wouldn’t risk it. Wouldn’t risk getting competition. Wouldn’t risk being topped. It’s not like Schmidt had let one of their very best man go snatch that vile. He just wanted to let his existence be known, he certainly did not expect their agent to come back.

Of course Zola had told him nothing about Barnes, or the others, and his attempt to recreate the serum. Couldn’t risk it. He’d watched the man - if he could still be called a man - for quite some time. He had lost sight of everything HYDRA was. Too obsessed with the Tesseract and using it to make a name for himself, he had forgotten there was a bigger picture. This wasn’t about power, this wasn’t about a single man. Who cared about the shadow of Hitler? This was about leading the world and preparing it to take its place in a universe larger than anyone could really fathom.

When Rogers stormed that base and freed the prisoners, when Schmidt flipped the switches… All Zola could do was save his most important notes and his observation reports. Such a shame he had to leave Barnes. But he knew, deep down, that he’d have a shot at getting him back and going further with him. Fate was on his side. Rogers was visibly the stuff of hero, and those guys don’t give up with just one victory.

Plus, Schmidt’s ego had been hurt enought that he’d show off and taunt the supersoldier with his bone density high enough to bend metal with a single punch.

Won’t be long before Schmidt’s arrogance and ego kills him though. Good riddance. Zola doesn’t mind the secrecy anyway. That’s how it has to be done, HYDRA operates best in the shades. There’s always going to be someone who’ll try to stop him, someone too affraid to finally see the light.

Schmidt is an inflated head of HYDRA. A head so inflated that it is a menace for its balance. Their existence has been revealed because of him. Somehow the SSR is still blaming Hitler for their foundation. How stupid.

However, that head shall fall and choke under its own weight. And as soon as Schmidt is out of the picture, Zola will step up as one of the new heads of HYDRA. He’s spent a long time watching, silently climbing the ranks. If he could just keep Barnes safe long enough...

***

Things didn’t go exactly as he planned them, but not all hope is lost. Sergeant Barnes is special. He has it in him. He’ll have survived that fall, the serum will have helped… And his team… His men on the ground will have found him. They’ll know what to do. They’ll keep him alive. He had been training a man, teaching him what he knows, slowly enabling him to carry out his ideas. Zola had faith that all of this would unfold for the best.

He may be a prisonner for now, but it won’t stay that way. They want him to cooperate, give intel. He will. He’s a scientist, he doesn’t care much about HYDRA, or the SSR, or the American Government. HYDRA, like everything else, like himself, is a means to a greater end. He’d thought the Tesseract could have been a way to learn more about “Gods” and other worlds, but Schmidt had become obsessed by its power, and as much as that power was interesting to study and harness, it had gotten slightly out of hands. So maybe things weren’t half as bad as what they may look like now. This may actually be better than what he originally planned. He’ll have access to everything they have on Steve Rogers, on Erskine. And they must have a lot. Journals, maybe. Blood samples, probably. Hell, if he could get his hands on that…

It’s just a matter of time before he is free and he can contact Frühig, his assistant. He’ll know for sure how it is. In the mean time he can only speculate, think of a dozen of scenarios a minute. In none of them Barnes is dead. This is not something he can begin to fathom. It can’t be. He’s got plans, projects. He’ll shape Barnes into being the perfect man, the first of many more. With Barnes, he’ll be able to lead the world on the right path, to finally make it worthy.

***

It took approximately a year. In the mean time, Captain America defeated the Red Skull. Of course. Good riddance. Too bad the Captain’s corpse had been lost in the process… But it was a necessary loss. Stark was still looking for it like a lovesick puppy. The idiot. What good will it do if he finds it? The American government will work on replicating the serum? And will succeed? And they’ll make a bunch of supersoldiers, and they’ll fight wars, become increasingly imperialistic… That cannot be. Those fools cannot get to rule the world or it’ll go to its doom. Forcing an ersatz of freedom on the masses… That works no better than snatching everything they call freedom away. But thankfully Zola is there, in the dark, almost invisible, discretely messing with data so that Stark’s submarines keep searching areas they’ve already searched to no avail. Stark is too desperate and messed up to notice such a subtle work. Soon he’ll give up. And even if he doesn’t, he’ll die at some point. The secrets of Erskine’s formula, if they are to be discovered, are to stay with Zola. Zola may be no superman, but he can see what should never be done.

Without the Red Skull in the way, Zola can let his science be free, and not be at the mercy of a short-sighed tyrant’s every whim. Schmidt had such an awful temper. Leading the world on the right path requires careful calculations, calm, and a vision. Schmidt had an ego too inflated to be successful, he’s always seen that.

Fortunately HYDRA cannot be destroyed. It’s too ancient and too versatile to sink with the fall of a single man who had since long lost all his mind. Cut off one head, two more shall take its place.

Trust Zola to be one of those much needed heads. He’d plate HYDRA’s body with the finest alloy. Zola would succeed to do what Schmidt was too self-obsessed to even dream. He’d end history.

He’d come to an agreement with his captors. He had cooperated, given a plethora of information. It didn’t matter. Zola had plans big enough for everything he gave away to actually be outdated, or of not much consequence. What mattered was that he was now trusted, to a certain extent. They saw him as a simple mindless scientist. The hands to build the Red Skull’s weapons, not the head that could lead a shadow army. As if plans only belonged to star-spangled men. But he was great, and even greater than that because he didn’t need to prove it.

They had found Barnes, in the snow. Half his arm was gone, but the men that found him said they couldn’t believe so much blood came from a single man. And they would know, those men had fought a war. Barnes was alive.

Zola was ecstatic. He’d known before running a single test that his serum had worked, his serum had _really_ worked. After a second of awe and genuine relief, he’d realized that the fact that there had been too much blood was a clue. His body was creating blood cells faster than what was the norm. Fast enough for him not to bled dry in that snow, to give time to his team to find him. The natural process by which the human body recovers from injuries was a much faster one with Barnes. (A bit messed up, yeah, but it had done the trick anyway.) Too fast for it to be inborn, Barnes had displayed no such ability when he had tested him in Austria. Sure, he’d been resistant, and stubborn. But nothing like this. Zola was a true genius.

In some of his wild fantasies he had wished for the Captain’s corpse, but this was much better. Like a permanent Christmas, only better. Barnes was his again.

Frühig had done an excellent job. He had stopped the bleeding, taken every relevant notes to inform Zola of what had been done. And then, then he had frozen Barnes. That technique was a bit experimental, but Frühig had extrapolated that Barnes was enhanced enough and would easily survive without being damaged that kind of treatment. Ice had magical properties. And that was saying something, because Zola didn’t believe in magic. Zola believed that there are things that the state of knowledge cannot explain at a certain given time, but that it’s a scientist’s duty to extend the boundaries of knowledge and not reject a possibility on the sole premise that it seems “crazy”.

But still, ice was magical. Simple and perfect. The best tool ever known to man for conservation. Freezing Barnes was a pretty fantastic decision from Frühig. Seemingly risky, but that was the right call. When Zola was able at last to return to _his_ lab (not one of HYDRA’s, not one that used to be under the authority of the Red Skull, no, his own lab that had followed him from Zurich to the Russian country side), Barnes was pretty much unchanged. Save for the copious bleeding, he was still that soldier who fell from a train in some European moutains.

Barnes was still that soldier who had lost half an arm in aforedmentionned fall.

Except Barnes wasn’t just any soldier. He was a brilliant, incredibly focused marksman.

A soldier needs both his arms.

A marksman all the more.

His arm needed fixing. Zola could do that. He would.

***

Everything was fine with Barnes. So fine it was astonishing, really. His vitals were good. Better, his vitals were excellent. Somehow, he refused to wake up though. Those things happen. It’s no big deal, really. He’d wake up when he would be ready to. No pressing matters here. There was delicate work to be done.

He’d thought it through, and had let Frühig in.

Barnes needed an arm.

They both agreed a man his quality couldn’t settle for just any arm.

New fields of vibranium had been found in Wakanda. There was a substantial amount… But not enough. And Frühig, when he’d done his research, had heard about a fascinating experiment. There was a man with outstanding regenerative healing abilities. A team had thought of coating his skeletton with an alloy supposed to imitate vibranium: Adamantium.

Every soldier needs a weapon.

Zola, assisted by Frühig, would make it so that Barnes had his best weapon with him at all times. HYDRA would go so far, so deep, with such a soldier fighting for them.

It took a few trials.

First, they thought the arm could work like a typical prosthesis. But this wouldn’t give Barnes any real mobility. It wouldn’t be any good if Barnes couldn’t use or think of the hand as his own.

So they knew they had to work on the electronic impulses of the brain. They knew they had to wire the arm directly to his brain. Well. It was nothing a man who harnessed the Tesseract’s power and overlooked each and everyone of Stark’s projects couldn’t do.

They were on their way to have sensors implanted in what was left of Barnes’s left arm when he woke up. The procedure required sawing off a bit of the arm. The cut wasn’t clean, so really it was just a matter of evening the levels, so that the prosthetic’s maintenance would show minimal trouble.

Barnes woke up with a scream. That wasn’t a pleasant sound.

Zola made sure Barnes would see in face, recognize him from their time in Azzano. He had been in such an excellent mindset then. Doing the work he was asked to do, coaxing the other soldiers into not rebelling, never saying a word if he didn’t have to, keeping his eyes where they had to be. That’s why he chose him.

He had tried with a dozen of other men, men that were being difficult, disruptive, and needing being taken care of. He knew that his formula wasn’t ready, but he needed to see it interract with a human body to figure out what he still had to improve.

He became as satisfied as he’d ever be with his formula, but something was still missing.

He got it while watching some American propaganda. It was striking how Aryan this Captain America was. He looked perfect, he even had a nice smile. And they weren’t using him in the field, in spite of all the physical strength he might have aquired… That might be clever though. They only had one Captain America after all (and honestly, he did grieve the loss of a mind like Erskine’s).. He read the reports, carefully, several times over. He knew. He knew how the guy tore the submarine apart, how he had run in the line of fire, how he had stopped to save a child. He wasn’t a soldier, not one bit. He was a nice guy. And those were the ones you had to steer clear off. Barnes would know by now.

And he’d been so eager to go to war, had acted so tough when they had made him. Would have caught a grenade to save guys who bullied him any chance they got. Well, the woman might have played a part, women have a tendency to interfere with tests, alas..

On this scrawny kid, Erskine’s formula had made sure his body grew big and strong enough to keep up with his heart. For Schmidt, it had strengthened his bones to the point that they’re be the last thing the rage, cruelty, hatred and hunger in him would consume, making sure his body stayed together. He’d left humanity behind, but that wasn’t entirely because of the serum.

Zola’s serum was as on point as it’d ever be. What he was needing to make it work was the right man.

Zola wasn’t trying to make a superior man, he wasn’t looking forward to dressing up the new HYDRA poster boy. He wasn’t trying to raise money. What he wanted was a true soldier at heart. One who wouldn’t shy away from missions, whatever they were. One who wouldn’t question. One who would do what had do be done.

So he visited the factory, watched the men. He saw how most of them were disgusted, reluctant. Most importantly, he saw how one of them was keeping his actions precise and doing exactly what he’d been instructed to do, not wasting energy with useless displays of emotions. And he saw how he inspired the ones around him to suck it up and do the job, move after move.

There wasn’t the shade of a doubt that Barnes was the one he needed.

When he tested him, tried to see what was his core… He never screamed. He clinged to the identity that had been thrown on him, clinged to the sides of the story that had been shaped, to the story line he’d followed. And Zola was amazed, really, because the guy wouldn’t break. Even when electricity was sent to his head, to his brain, Barnes was keeping it together. Doing what he had to do to stay sane, doing his best to remember where he came from and who he was supposed to be. His mission in this war was to stay alive as long as he could and give a hand in bringing the bad guys down. All he could do at the moment was the former, and trying his hardest at not being made one of the bad guys himself.

That was shallow, of course. But that was working.

Later, when the facility was burning to the ground, he saw Barnes with the Captain, felt the intimacy between them, the wordless bond that only a life of fighting each other’s battles could bring and he tought to himself: “of course”.

A kid who so adamantly refused to accept the fragility and finity of his own life could have only made it out this far because someone so much more selfless and stronger than him had been there all the way to do the dirty work and keep the boy alive, as if it was his mission to do so.

And really, it had been.

So hearing Barnes scream, this man so strong and resolved and focused being in pain to the point of screaming his lungs out… That could have broken Zola’s determination, but fortunately he had a larger picture to look at.

He could guess that wiring some electronic equipment to a man’s brain wasn’t exactly painless. And they hadn’t exactly bothered to give him some form of anesthesia. He would’ve, but Frühig had pointed out that they needed to know if they were doing it right or not, that Barnes was already asleep anyway and that if the pain was too much, he’d pass out like anyone else. And Frühig, being Zola’s protégé, had been very right.

Zola feared that Barnes would be too disoriented. A marksman needed to know where he was more than anything.

So he stepped in front of him, careful not to be all he’d see because that and the sensations would only panic him. He spoke, calm and composed, trying his best to put a smile on his face and in his voice. He wanted Barnes to think of him and HYDRA as home, because he knew from all the information he had gathered on his life with Steve Rogers that that was how you’d gain his true loyalty. And what good is a soldier if he isn’t loyal? So he tried to put hints of affection in his voice. Not too much, not so fast. Just enough to reassure him he was being taken care of.

“Sergeant Barnes. The procedure has already started.”

After the operation, they tried to plug his stump into the prototype of a prosthetic they had build, turned it on.That’s how they knew they had done a fine job, because Barnes had woken up with a scream once again, his brain not being used to gathering such information in such a way yet and interpreting that as pain, seeing the prosthetic where it imagined was a flesh arm, a flesh hand, confused.

They knew for sure they had been successful, because Barnes had clenched both of his fists.

To Zola, those clenched fists spelled dangerous feelings like glee and satisfaction, pride.

“You are to be the new fist of HYDRA”. They still had so much to work on, though, so he turned to the team and gave them another instruction, one that would buy him enough time to think this through. “Put him on ice”.

That was the first and last time James Barnes got to feel what cryo freeze felt like.

***

It was a long process, figuring out what Barnes could take and how far they could go, what were their limitations with the arm.

Zola smiles when he wonders if Captain America ever knew he was an inspiration to more people than he could possibly dream of.

With Frühig, they talk a lot about the adamantium experiment. They love the idea, they really do. Barnes lost half an arm, but they’re going to give him so much more. They want to give him a new one. One that’ll be entirely his, that he’ll be able to use as a weapon, but more importanty, one that’ll grant him protection.

They picked a bunch of random cripples for their tests. A metal arm (and they’ve tried several metals, several alloys), is too heavy to be functionnal. But if they go deeper than the arm… If they replace some bones, and if they keep what they can of Barnes’ arm…

Once the plans are thought through and designed, they wake him up.

***

He doesn’t know who this Sergeant Barnes they speak of is. He know’s that man’s face though. It reminds him of something that feels like pain, but different, and worse. It reminds him of another face too. A face he knows he’s never gonna see again, because he is dead, somehow they both are. Steve. The face’s name is Steve. He remembers looking at a colourful shield. Thinking that used to be his job. Thinking he did well enough that now Steve doesn’t need him to do that anymore, he lived long enough to become strong. Thinking that he did a pretty piss poor job because Steve keeps throwing himself head first in danger, and the dangers now are on a whole other scale. Now Steve needs him to shoot at guys who want to kill him. Yeah, that’s who he is.

In the back of his mind, there’s the sound of a familiar name. HYDRA.

He remembers taking a girl to dance and he remembers Steve carefully combing his hair but never asking a girl out. He remembers Steve sulking at him, he remembers tickling him until laughter triggered a mild asthma attack. He remembers thinking of all the Steves in the world, all the fellas too stubborn to run away and he remembers enlisting. He remembers the war and he remembers things he doesn’t want to remember.

He opens is eyes and he doesn’t see his left hand but he can _feel_ it and he remembers more pain than he is comfortable with.

And Zola is looking at him, and he knows, he _is_ Sergeant Barnes and they’re gonna take that and make it something else, make it about them. They’re gonna make him the one people should run away from.

There’s another man next to Zola, one he doesn’t know but it doesn’t matter. They’re talking, they’re talking to him, they’re talking about ribs and the heart of a good man and James thinks blue because that’s the colour of Steve’s eyes and Steve’s a good man and he tries to keep thinking blue, tries to let the blue wrap him because there is nothing else he can do. They are going to do what they want to do with him, and he is going to survive that because he knows how to keep his mouth shut when it matters and that’s how he survives everything.

They keep talking, and he knows somebody won the war, because they say the war has been over for a long time, and wars only stop when somebody wins.

He remembers Steve watching him die.

They keep talking and the man who isn’t Zola says that Steve (but he doesn’t call him Steve) was too busy fighting to be looking for him. He sinked in the Arctic with the Red Skull’s plane, his corpse still to be found.

Zola says he’s sorry for his loss. James focuses extra hard to not believe that, because he knows how emotional manipulation works.

So Steve died, and somebody won and they’ve got exactly what they wanted. A legend to cash on. All good legends die heroically.

And there’s a thought, and Bucky can’t even think of barring it. This time Steve didn’t waste any time looking for him. He was dead anyway. He completed the mission. He did what he had to do, like the soldier he wanted to be.

James wonders what it is he has to do now.

***

They put him through surgery and saying it hurts like a bitch doesn’t even begin to cover it. Maybe he should have paid attention when they talked about a good man’s heart, because the next thing he knows his ribs are coated in some metal. They tell him, and he can feel the extra weight. It’s not much because the layer of metal is really thin but he can still feel it.

It’s months and months and maybe years of one surgery after another, of feeling different and of feeling differently, it’s amounts of pain he can’t describe and his body not being his and part of his body not being flesh and bones anymore, it’s parts of a machine being given to him as replacement for his body, it’s his body and machinery blending together.

They remake him, no suprise.

There’s lifting and angling and all kinds of physical exercices to know what’s wrong, what has to be fixed, what can be improved.

In the mean time they feed him, and they feed him good.

There’s a girl, Carla, she asks him if he asks him if he likes spinach - he does ; and if he’s ever eaten veal - he hasn’t. She bakes him a chocolate cake once and he feels like crying because this is real. One day he knows it’s summer because she brings him fresh strawberries and she tells him that they could go to the garden together and grow some. Carla likes gardening and tells him she came to cooking only because she was so fascinated with fruits and vegetables. Carla must do some sorcery with carrots because James is pretty sure they’re not supposed to taste that good.

He still sleep in a cell but it’s harder and harder to think of it as a cell when it looks like a regular room.

Annie makes sure he never runs out of clean socks and brings him a new toothbrush every month because dental hygiene is really important, and because a man can’t go anywhere if his socks are dirty.

He knows he’s under surveillance, but his guard, Andrew, is so young that it can’t be serious. They play poker together, and Andrew, who’s all limps and freckles tells him about the world. Shit doesn’t look so good for Germany. It only takes all of four minutes for James to figure out that Andrew licks his teeth when he’s bluffing.

No-one ever talks about Steve because no-one knew him, and James wonders why this doesn’t make it easier for him, why he keeps thinking of a guy who went and died.

He doesn’t wanna go back home where Captain America who isn’t really Steve but wears his face is everywhere. He’s got no idea how he’s gonna survive back home, what he’s gonna do with his days when there is no more Steve to follow around and watch over.

He hears a lot of people speaking in Russian and he wants to learn, and Annie who’s got the reddest hair he’s ever seen and the huge belly of a pregnant woman teaches him. His accent is not so great, but he’s doing okay. When he wants to sleep at night, he plays her lullabies in his dead, let red wrap him and there ain’t so many nightmares.

Red used to be a terrible colour. It used to be Steve’s split lip and his knuckles raw from that one time a guy knocked Steve unconscious and fellow soldiers clutching his arm and not letting go and bleeding to death. Red used to be the very bad nights -days- and all the nightmares but Annie’s got sweet hands and she let him feel her belly when the baby kicked and everything is grey here save for her red hair. It’s gonna be a baby girl, she says, and she’ll call her Natalia. Her voice is strong and determined, and he knows she spent a long time looking for the right name because a name is the only thing she’ll ever be allowed to give her daughter.

Zola talks to him, every day while he checks up on James and his arm. One day he looks concerned, his brow furrowed and his hands twitchy, which isn’t like him. He gives him the talk, and really James knew this was coming. He tells him he’s worried, that the world needs him, that he doesn’t want to impose and put such a burden on him when he’s just a man and is still recovering but the world has changed and isn’t doing well. And James may be just a man, but he is an exceptionnal one.

There is a job for him, something no-one else can do. HYDRA isn’t the evil the Allies liked to paint, and surely James must have figured that out by now. They both have a responsibility not to let this world go to its doom. It’s a heavy burden, but he can be a hero if he wants to. A legend.

James braces himself, holds very tightly the thought of blond hair and tried not to let himself be fooled. He knows, he can read between the lines, he’s learned how to do that. He can either do HYDRA’s work like he did Steve’s or die trying to be a hero.

He’s afraid, he’s terrified, that this is something he will have to do, because ultimately he still doesn’t wanna die.

He’s taken to a range once every week and he knows there is no more stalling, that after all the care he’s been given he is expected to be back at full ability. He shoots all the targets perfectly because he doesn’t wanna give them a reason to stop being nice with him.

***

Andrew gets sadder and sadder, and his head is definitely not in poker. James asks him what’s wrong, because he’s learned to tell difference between a guy who wants to be asked and a guy who needs to be distracted before he’ll confide in you (Steve was the latter). Andrew says he’s got a cousin back home, in the States, someone really important to him who will be sent to a stupid, meaningless war somewhere in Asia. He gets angry and he doesn’t let the tears roll on his cheeks but he blames the Senators and the Representatives and if he had known, if he had had the chance, he’d have killed a few of them before they could advocate for this war.

Andrew is always somewhat gloomy after that.

***

They order him very politely on a mission. They explain to him who the target is, and why they have to be killed but he doesn’t listen, he can’t focus on that because is mind is full of Steve in clothes too big for him because he never saw how tiny his body really was. They tell him about somebody they want him to shoot, and he’s stuck remembering how Steve had to hold him back in more than one back alley, he feels his hands on his biceps, except now his biceps is metal. He remembers Steve crashing after that rescue mission, they’re in the middle of nowhere and Steve is crying hot tears in the crook of his neck and he keeps asking him “how do you do this Buck? How do you do this?” and he knows, God he knows Steve cannot kill but Steve wanted to join the army and now he has to. Steve’s body grew as big as his heart is but his skin will never be thick enough for him to do this. Steve could never kill but ended up doing it anyway and now James doesn’t want to anymore because all there is to stop him when he is about to cross the line is the memory of soft little hands on his biceps, and he’s a marksman but he doesn’t know if he’ll ever see that line before crossing it.

Carla wishes him luck for the mission and promises her best lasagna when he comes back successful, Annie hugs him and Andrew winks at him and Zola keeps saying how much they trust him. The other man tells him that he can do it, that they’re looking for a home for Annie’s little girl and maybe it’ll be a good one. He takes a breath and he adds - and James knows that’s the important part, because of the way the man’s eyes purposely go out of focus, like he’s feigning to talk to himself and wants James to knows - he adds that he hopes, he hopes to god, that the girl will be healthy and not in need of _medication_ of any sort. James isn’t stupid and doesn’t wish that raging fire on an inocent baby.

So he goes on the mission, he follows every order.

The target’s a woman, he has her in his sight and he has his finger on the trigger. And he can’t pull it. Every time he tries to he hears Steve asking him not to die. He feels him hugging him, he feels the hugs of both a little man and a bulked up one but it’s the same blue eyes and the same skin, there’s just more of it. He hears Steve telling him he’s sorry for letting him go to this war, for letting him go to this fight no man should have to fight. He hears Steve, and somehow he can see him too, that lilttle man getting used to a big body, _Bucky, come on, that wasn’t something stupid, that was the right thing_ and he remembers him saying time and time again that doing the right thing is bigger than you, and damn right it was bigger than him.

He looks at the woman’s brown hair and his vision is clouded with blond hair and blue eyes and pale skin and the fear of a line he wouldn’t be allowed to cross and suddenly his hands are sweaty and he can’t pull the trigger, can’t execute the order.

He knows what not executing an order means for a soldier, he’s seen it multiple times. He doesn’t know the details of what that’ll mean for Annie’s baby and that disgusts him.

He hates himself for the way his admiration for Steve gets in the way of his own safety.

***

The woman is taken down eventually, he was just not the one to do it. He knows he failed, like he knows this was a test.

They come back and Annie’s stomach is flatter than it was. She has an arm around Andrew’s shoulders, who tells him his cousin is dead. The spark in Annie’s eyes is gone and she doesn’t even look at him.

The tarnished flame of a red-haired baby girl springs to his mind.

He can’t fail a mission ever again.

Barnes wants to forget everything about Steve.

***

According to Zola, it is gonna hurt. The other man doesn’t say a word, just looks at him with a smirk.

It does, hell it hurts more than he could ever tell, but he won’t remember it, or why, or what pain means, or why he is hurting in the first place. In the grand scheme of things, this doesn’t matter.

When he stands back up, his body still remembers how to carry a riffle and shoot a trigger. When he stands back up, he doesn’t have to remember HYDRA is home for he never had any other.

What’s left of him is that he does what it is he has to do, whatever it is.

Soon, they brand him, a red star on his metal shoulder, and he knows shapes and colours and many many things but he doesn’t know that they mean something anymore. In locked down corridors of his mind, the word “birthmark” rolls around.

It’s decades of work. Eliminating politicians, scientists, engineers all over the world. Shaping the century. Giving History a nudge in the right direction.

They keep telling him what it is he has to do, and he doesn’t die.

Eventually Zola is the one who sort of dies. There’s another one not quite like him. But nice, too. Civil. Except at this point, he doesn’t even remember that he does things because that’s the way he can keep on surviving. At this point, even his body tends to forget about his promise not to do more harm than he strictly has to, and the feeling of tiny hands on his biceps is so frequent that it doesn’t disturb him anymore.

Feelings don’t disturb him anymore. His body never learned to identify his feelings, and they locked away everything that was stored in his mind, including his name. He doesn’t need a name anyway. Ghosts aren’t so scary once they have names. You scare children with tales of nameless monsters in the dark, and you keep the world from trying to spin in the wrong direction by the precise movements of a nameless ghost.

***

There’s a man on the bridge. He failed the mission. He failed because of the man on the bridge. The man on the bridge knows him. Or the him that he was in another life. Who was he?

Who was he?

His brain may not, but his body still remembers everything he needs to forget about Steve Rogers. Blue is making a fuss in some faraway corners of his mind and tries its hardest to break through all the walls and all the defences.

Every time they have to do this, he remembers only one instance of the pain, though his body keeps track of everything. He knows of past lives because of scars he doesn’t see on anyone else and doesn’t remember getting. The pain is intense. It’s like being born again, if he can imagine what being born is like. And every time they have to pry his life away from him, they strip him down to naked violence, to hurting and killing everything near him. And then they try to tame that violence, use it to their advantage. It’s a tough balance to find. If they wipe everything, they lose their most precious asset. They know, you can’t take away everything he’s ever learned, felt and knew. That’s not what they’re after, it never was. It’s simply part of the deal. Something they had to do. And even if they wanted to completely erase everything, they couldn’t: The serum won’t let it happen. It’s more a question of burning bridges, putting up thick walls in his mind. Not letting him access the knowledge and memories that’ll turn him away from them, away from the mission.

He is a fist, he doesn’t need to do the thinking. That’s what heads are for.

He doesn’t need purpose. He doesn’t know what purpose means. He needs orders and targets, food and ammunitions.

He’s in misery, but he’s got no way to express that, no way to understand that, no way to fight that. It’s all out of reach.

The walls in his mind are thinner than they used to be, and blue wraps him. He feels something, all over, and he thinks that maybe that’s what is called “hurt”, but he may be mistaken.

He is a soldier, and he’s got a mission.

 


End file.
